The product is not in one domain and Customer Experience in another domain. Any serious examination of the Customer Experience has to grapple with the product and how well it does the job that the customer is hiring it to do. That means designing that product so that it is both useful (does the job) and usable (easy/intuitive) to use.

Today, I stand by that conversation. In particular, the necessity and critical importance of the ‘product’ (the core product or service which calls forth the customer to reach out and interact with the organisation which is selling that product or service) to any serious work on improving-transforming the customer’s experience of the organisation.

I also find that I was wrong. How so? Today, I’d sum up that conversation differently. How would I sum it up? As follows:

The ‘product’ is not in one domain and Customer Experience in another domain. Any serious examination of the Customer Experience (as in the customer’s experience) has to grapple with the ‘product’ and how well it does the job that the customer is hiring it to do. That means designing the ‘product’ so that it is useful (does the job), usable (easy/intuitive to use), and sensuous (evokes the senses and calls forth awe). When you get the ‘product’ right you will learn that in a substantial-meaningful way that the customer’s experience and loyalty start and end with the design of the ‘product’. If you have the right product then you can concentrate on marketing (advertising, distributing) it. Little need to waste your time on the latest corporate nonsense: customer experience management as in customer interaction management across a multitude of interaction channels.

What has led me to this way of summing up the matter? Apple. In particular, Apple’s latest financial results – the largest quarterly corporate profit of any company. Let’s look into the quarterly figures a little bit more: revenue of $75bn, profit of $18bn, and Apple sold 34,000 iPhones per hour. Allow me to share this paragraph with you (bolding mine):

Apple chief executive Tim Cook called the company’s sales “phenomenal” and said the company had sold 34,000 iPhones an hour every day of the quarter. “This volume is hard to comprehend,” Cook said.

I am now going to make my most controversial assertion. Ready? I say that the field of Customer Experience Management (as in customer interaction management) is attractive to and for the mediocre. Yes, the mediocre! You know the folks that do not design-sell great ‘products’. ‘Products’ that do not simplify-enrich the lives of our fellow human beings. Look if you make a great product then the world beats a path to your door -including overcoming any hurdles along the path. Only CXM fools ignore the critical importance of the ‘product’. Isn’t the product the reason that the customer takes action – to actual reach out to the business in the first place?

Today’s conversation completes this four part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) centred on Nunwood‘s 2014 UK Analysis report. In this conversation I want to talk about CX improvement. Specifically, what Nunwood say about what it takes to generate CX improvement.

What Does It Take To Excel At The Customer Experience Game? How Should Your Organisation Go About It?

The authors of the Nunwood report show up for me as being practical folks. They get that there is fine balance between aspiration and pragmatism. Here’s what they write (bolding mine)

For most brands, trying to improve performance simply by emulating John Lewis or First Direct can be counterproductive. Trying to move too quickly, or claiming to be something at odds with reality, can cause credibility and cultural issues. The rapid and sustainable progress of the top brands is the result of long-term, diligent investment.

… the temptation of many chief executives ….. is to set an expectation … that the organisation will soon resemble a top 10 brand……. Transformational change is seldom less than five year project. In fact, a considerable number of brands ranked 100th to 263rd in this study have publicly held similar goals since 2010 and climbed no more than a few places over this time. Rallying cries must be credible, as well as loud.

Equally dangerous is the risk of myopically focusing just on the immediate sector competitors, who are often only marginally different in the consumers’ eyes.

Given this what is it that the authors advise? Here is what they say:

… the question for many brands is not how to get into the top 10 within 12 months, nor is it simply how to be the best of their immediate competitors. Rather, the best dividends come from understanding how to accelerate the rate of customer experience change.

Which Four Critical Dimensions Do Businesses Need To Master In Order To Accelerate Customer Experience Improvement?

According to the authors these are the four critical dimensions that businesses need to master to generate sustainable and significant improvements in CX excellence:

A business is mobilised around a common vision;

Customer journeys are mapped and prioritised for change;

Measurement is owned by the frontline and linked to actions; and

Customer experience motivates the employee experience.

As I look at these four critical dimensions it occurs to me that the only one that is ‘easy’ is the first half of the second item on the list: mapping of customer journeys. Why is this the case? Because you can get a bunch of people together and get them doing customer journey mapping without any disruption to organisational politics or day-to-day operations. Is that why customer journey mapping, and VoC surveying, are so common place. And action that actually changes anything worth changing so rare?

It occurs to me that it is no easy-simple task to come up with a common vision for the customer experience. And it is a major challenge to get everyone in the business to row in the same direction and in sync with one another. The devil often turns out to be in the detail. The other day I was in a meeting where all the buzzword were there: trusted, easy to do business with, personalisation, consistence…. And everyone was in agreement in this level. The fun came when it came to filling out these empty words with something concrete: What set of practices are ruled out if we are to be trustworthy? What set of practices do we need to embrace to be easy to do business with? What does personalisation actually mean? And so forth.

Take a look at number three on the list: measurement is owned at the front line and linked to actions. Ask yourself why the call-centre agent on minimum wage, working in factory like conditions, should care, genuinely care, about owning measurement and taking action. Or flip it and ask yourself who loses out if power moves from head office to the operations, from managers to the people who actually deal with customers? Furthermore, for this to genuinely occur then something like the practices put forth by Deming (‘drive fear out of the workplace’) and implemented by Toyota (the workers own the design-execution-improvement of the work processes and machinery) need to occur.

Customer experience motivates the employee experience. What does this mean? I take it to mean that you start with figuring out the kind of customer experience that you propose to generate. And use this to figure out which kind of employee experience you need to cause in order for the employees to cause the customer experience you have in mind. In many businesses, and every service business where the employees touch the customer, it means relaxing control, embracing flexibility and encouraging improvisation-creativity-responsiveness to the situation at hand. It means treating employees as human beings rather than resources which come in the troublesome form of human being. It means that power has to move to where the action occurs: the frontline. Who does this threaten? Managers at all levels of the organisation.

Why do I point this out? To reinforce the point that the authors make and which I shared earlier:

Transformational change is seldom less than five year project. In fact, a considerable number of brands ranked 100th to 263rd in this study have publicly held similar goals since 2010 and climbed no more than a few places over this time. Rallying cries must be credible, as well as loud.

At this point, I ask you this question: what kind of leader and exercise of leadership plants the seeds of transformational change and then nurtures this seeds to fruition? Can it be the kind of leaders that are commonplace today? Which leader is going to embark in a journey which involves hardship, including putting one’s reputation and selfhood at stake, and which not yield fruits for at least five years? It occurs to me only one that it is going to be there in a leadership role for much longer than five years. Now think of Jeff Bezos at Amazon, or Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Steve Jobs at Apple, Richard Branson at Virgin…

That concludes the conversation on Nunwood’s 2014 UK Analysis report. I hope that I made some contribution to you. Thanks for listening.

This conversation continues on from where the earlier one ended. As promised, I have been looking at what Nunwood has to say about certain brands. And find myself in a position to share with you the table that I have put together:

What Does It Take To Be A Customer Experience Excellence Leader?

Just about everyone I come across business is looking for the answer, the recipe, the formula for turning the ordinary into extraordinary, base metal to gold; Nobody has or makes the time to linger, to think and rethink, to grapple with, experiment, and finally arrive at a home made ‘solution’ to any serious challenge. So is there a recipe/formula for CX excellence?

If there is, then it is worth taking a look at First Direct as it is in top place in 2014 and has consistently been in the top 10. Here is what the folks at Nunwood say on the matter (bolding mine):

The First Direct formula is remarkably simple one, yet it has proved difficult to implement in other organisations: remove the barriers between customers and the bank; employ people who want to serve the customer and care about doing a good job; train them intensely and empower them to handle and resolve any issues brought to them by the customer.

What does this look like from a customer perspective? Let’s listen to a First Direct customer:

I was in Venice when my credit card was refused and it was quite stressful. I phoned First Direct and talked with a patient man with a great sense of humour who spent time talking to me about the holiday, acknowledged this this was a stressful thing to happen and worked methodically to sort thing out. I rarely phone First Direct as I can do almost everything online, but is was so important that when I needed them, they were unfailingly polite, human and ready to treat me as valued customer.

What Is It That Is Missing From The CX Game Of Excellence?

I have read the Nunwood report several times. And putting this report together with other reports and my lived experience I find myself thinking “There is no rocket science here!” and find myself in agreement with the author of the Nunwood 2014 UK CX report when they say (referring to First Direct) that the formula for CX excellence is a remarkably simple one. So why is it that so many brands fail to make any meaningful shifts/progress in CX excellence? Allow me to point at what occurs to me as ‘that which is missing the presence of which makes all the difference’ by sharing a personal story with you.

Earlier this week I was due to be at an important meeting in central London at 10:00. Seven people were counting on me to be there to ‘chair’ the meeting. I was counting on myself to be there to chair the meeting. The unexpected occurred on my way to the rail station. I found myself at a stand still on the road for 45 minutes or so. I took the next train – thirty minutes later than I had planned. This meant that my contingency was gone – everything had to work out just right if I was to make that meeting on time. I arrived at Paddington Station and made my way hurriedly toward the underground. Suddenly, I found my feet sliding, no control, left knee smacks into the hard tile floor, right leg twists awkwardly, the right ankle is in some pain. A helpful gentlemen helps me up. I recover and get that the floor has become an ice rink in some place (food for a future post). I walk slowly, in pain, towards the underground. The up escalator is out of action so I make my way up the stairs – slowly and awkwardly, in pain. I walk for several minutes to the underground entrance. It is closed. I ring both of my colleagues and the client to let them know that I am likely to be late.

Making my way to the taxi rank I notice a long queue and get that if I wait there I will not get to the meeting on time. So I make my way down the stairs and out of Paddington Station. Leaving the station, the rain falls down and I start getting wet. I walk away from Paddington station and towards central London. Why? I get that I have to get far enough away from the station to find an empty taxi. As I am walking I am in pain and mindful that I have to walk carefully on my sprained ankle. After walking for 5 – 10 minutes I find a black cab. I tell the cab driver that he is blessing, a Godsend. We arrive at the client’s office – five minutes after the meeting has started. What do I find? The meeting is on the sixth floor and all the lifts are out of service. What do I do? I embrace the pain, walk as mindfully and carefully as I can, and make my way up the stairs to the sixth floor. I chair the meeting, we do what needs to be done. Just after noon I leave and make my way home as I am in considerable pain.

What was it that allowed me to overcome a series of obstacles and considerable pain to honor my commitment? Absolute commitment to the commitments that I make: playing full out to honor my word. Ask yourself how often you find that kind of commitment when it comes to the CX realm. Now you have your answer to why it is that so few are CX Excellence Leaders and most are languishing in ‘no mans land’ of averageness.

Enough for today. In the next post I will bring this series of post on the Nunwood 2014 UK CX report to a close. I wish you a great day and thank you for your listening.

What can we learn from Havas Media’s 2013 Meaningful Brands survey?

Just 20% of brands worldwide are seen to meaningfully positively impact people’s lives;

The majority of people worldwide wouldn’t care if 73% of brands disappeared tomorrow;

Only 32% feel brands communicate honestly about commitments and promises;

54% of us don’t trust brands; and

The meaningful brand index outperforms the stock markets by 120%.

It would appear that the case for making a shift towards a ‘meaningful brand’ is compelling according to Havas Media and yet most brands do not show up as meaningful. This shows up as interesting for me given all the talk-spend on brand, branding and brand building.

Let’s shift perspective and take a look at the situation through the eyes of Customer Experience.

What is the state of Customer Experience at the end of 2013?

“Are organizations seeing the value of delivering a great customer experience? Clearly they pay lip service, but we know that actions speak louder than words. Do they really get it? No. There’s no real commitment of time, resources, and budgets to initiatives that improve the customer experience.

I spend a lot of time talking to prospects and clients about how to sell the value of customer experience to company leaders. It’s so disheartening …..”

My experience resonates with Annette’s. And our experience is not unique – talk with Customer Experience professionals and you get a taste of how difficult it is to move the Customer Experience ball beyond conducting VoC surveys and collating-publishing the results.

So what is going on here? If Tops are VCs and Customer Experience is seen as investment then the Tops do not see the value of investing in Customer Experience ventures.

What is the state of CRM at the end of 2013?

It occurs to me that large established companies have spent large sums of money in the name of CRM – usually in procuring and implementing so called CRM systems. What is there to show for this investment in terms of generating superior value for customers and cultivating meaningful profitable relationships with customers?

As I look around I find that the single customer view is just as elusive today as it was when Siebel was promising it, through the adoption of its CRM suite, back in 1999. The gulf between the talk and the reality continues to stun me. So many companies still struggle to work out the totality of their relationships (products purchased, interactions) with their customers.

I notice that many marketing, sales and service (customer, field) processes are just as broken today as they were in 1999. Why? Because too many people implemented CRM to automate the existing way of doing business.

It occurs to me that the challenge of getting the marketing, sales and service folks to genuine work together to build meaningful relationships with customers is beyond almost all companies. These functions and the people in them continue to work in silos, pursue their functional objectives, and work to their particular style.

I notice that the state of fragmentation within the marketing function is higher today than in 1999 due to the proliferation of digital channels. Marketing has become so complex that a whole industry, marketing automation, has grown up with the aim of automating marketing with a view to taking the complexity out of it.

Why do organisations continue to grapple with the same challenges despite their investments in CRM and Customer Experience?

Having been in the field since 1999 I am struck about how little has really changed despite all the changes that have occurred outside and inside organisations. What is going on here? Why is this the case?

It occurs to me that most of that which has taken place in the areas of CRM and Customer Experience has occurred in the domain of doing. And this doing has arisen from the same old domain of being. And as such, the mode of being has poisoned-corrupted all the doing. How best to illustrate this? Think King Midas. Whatever King Midas touched it became gold. Being has that kind of power: every action is tainted with the being that gives rise to it. Yet, those who have walked the CRM and Customer Experience path have been oblivious to this corruption because the the current style of showing up in the world is so taken for granted that it is invisible to us:

“The way of life of a culture is not an explicit set of beliefs held by the people living in it. It is much deeper than that. A person brought up in a culture learns its way of life the way he learns to speak in the language and with the accent of his family and peers. But a way of life is much broader than this. It involves a sense for how it is appropriate and inappropriate to act in each of the social situations one normally encounters; a familiarity with how to make sense of things and of how to act in the everyday world; and most general of all, a style, such as aggressive or nurturing, that governs the actions of the people in the culture although they are normally not aware of it. We can think of it as a cultural commitment that, to govern people’s behaviour, must remain in the background, unnoticed but pervasive and real.“

– All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

This sense of the being, of the default ‘style’, of organisations (and the people who work in them) is spelled out clearly by Vik Maraj in an interview published on the Huffington Post where he talks about the challenge of transforming the not for profit sector:

“Question: What is the over-arching challenge in the not for profit sector?

Answer: We act mostly inside of a context of charity not empowerment. Very few people are “learning to fish”. And this is a societal issue not just a not for profit issue.

Question: With respect to the not for profit sector, what is the truth that we don’t want to talk about?

Answer. We compete with each other with a smile on. We protect ourselves. And we collaborate in an opportunistic way. And the game is rigged such that this behaviour is almost inevitable. And the rigging is usually done by a decades old governmental policy…….

At first some of the obvious challenges are a lack of funding, a lack of resources, a lack of volunteers, turnover, a lack of being valued, lower salaries, lack of training and development, lack of policy, political unwillingness, the economy, etc. There are many more that I have not mentioned and what they all have in common is that none of them are the real problem.

Question: What’s the real problem, and what’s the answer?

Answer: The real problem is that we don’t collaborate and align our vast, often duplicated resources, talents, and mandates, to have a collective voice. Collaboration is both a missing mindset as well as a missing process. We mostly define collaboration as “getting together”. As one of our clients said, “[we act as] independent islands chipping away at symptoms”.

Almost all transformative change started with a series of small groups led by a few courageous people. They came together to tell the truth to one another, did the tough work to get over their differences, and then whole-heartedly went after an intolerable circumstance that each could not surmount on their own! The answer is to move from a “me or you” mindset to a “me and you mindset” and to stop pretending that we are always noble or even often noble!

Question: If this is the answer, at least one powerful answer – so then why aren`t we doing it?

Answer: Good question. Given the common goals, overlapping skillsets, and in many cases overlapping client bases and services, why aren’t we truly collaborating and coming together to increase the power of our voice and share resources, information, and talent? Why? The answer is that there is too much self-interest and survival thinking to allow for this. Making it and surviving forms an almost inescapable context within which people operate.

If you are awake and have any lived experience of the for profit sector you will see the parallels.

Summing up, excellence in CRM and Customer Experience requires a transformation in the character (being) of organisations (and the people in the organisations especially the Tops) not just a change of clothes to project a more ‘customer friendly’ personality. This is a challenge that few have taken on wholeheartedly – arguably the CRM and Customer Experience fixes were actions designed to bypass the need for a genuine shift in being, in transforming from extractive capitalism to conscious capitalism.

This third post completes the series of posts based on the Nunwood’s 2013 annual customer experience excellence report (The UK’s Top Customer Brands: How They Achieve Success). You can find the earlier posts here:

Who leads the “Value Top 10” table? Giff Gaff. What allows this brand, this organisation to create this kind of value for its customers?

Giff Gaff is something of an anomaly in the field of mobile communications. A SIM only provider with no high street presence, it is entirely focused on delivering best value. Giff Gaff gives back to their members through savings – cutting away costs that rivals have to cover such as physical stores, customer service teams …..

A quirky company Giff Gaff say you are not a customer – you are a member of the family. Members of the Giff Gaff family save considerable amounts on their purchases and receive rewards for promoting services and contributing to their on-line care.

The concept of membership, being part of something, is powerful one and for Giff Gaff it leads to a highly engaged and hugely active online community.

Drawing its name from a Scottish phrase for mutual giving, this community is encouraged to share ideas, potential rewards and price plans via forums. Many unique selling points and technical developments are credited to members…….

Fundamental to its success has been the unique way they have put customers at the very centres of their business…… The notion of a common sense of purpose with your customers is a powerful one.

What I want to draw your attention to the following:

1. It occurs to me that Giff Gaff is inventing-experimenting with-perfecting a new way of doing business. Not a customer-centred way of doing business. Nor a shareholder centred way of doing business. No, it is deeply immersed in a ‘community-membership’ way of doing business. In this way of doing business, the customer plays many roles in addition to the role of customer: as marketer, as sales person, as R&D advisor, as customer services agent, as a ‘shareholder’…..

2. I am clear that Giff Gaff has got social right because social is the heart-ethos of the business. Social is not a bolt-on. Social is the business. I say mutual giving is the definitive test of an authentically social way of showing up in the world.

3. Will Giff Gaff do to the mobile industry what the mini-mills did to the US steel industry? That is to say is Giff Gaff show up for me as an example of a low end disruptive innovator according to Clayton Christensen model. Or will its parent O2 ‘kill’ it like GM did with Saturn when Saturn became a threat to GM’s way of doing business?

As a member of Giff Gaff I notice that Giff Gaff is travelling the path that Amazon/Bezos has travelled. Which path? The path of listening to customers and using this listening to figure out which products-services to introduce next. For example, Giff Gaff is no longer a SIM only provider. Giff Gaff now sells a small range of the popular phones.

If you want to learn more about Giff Gaff then I recommend reading the following posts:

Want to learn more

If you want to learn more about these brands (Giff Gaff, Butlins, QVC, Tesco Mobile), or any of the other Top 10 UK Customer Experience brands, I suggest that you download-read Nunwood’s annual Customer Experience report: CEE-Centre-2013-UK-Full-Report

This post continues the conversation started in the earlier post which disclosed the UK’s Top 10 Customer Experience brands and provided an analysis of the Top 100 brands by industry.

Nunwood’s Six Pillars of Customer Experience

The folks at Nunwood claim “we have used advanced text analytic techniques to derive and then statistically validate the six most important factors that customers talk about when it comes to great experiences”. What are these factors?

Time & Effort: valuing the customers time – minimising the effort and creating frictionless processes

Expectations: managing, meeting and exceeding customer expectations

Integrity: being trustworthy and engendering trust

Resolution: turning a poor customer experience into a great one

Empathy: achieving an understanding of the customer’s circumstances to drive deep rapport

What can we learn about these six pillars of Customer Experience by looking at the Top 10 brands?

In their report Nunwood list the top brands by each of the Customer Experience pillars. So:

Amazon sits at the very top for the Personalisation and Time & Effort pillars;

Virgin Atlantic is the leader in the Expectations pillar;

John Lewis leads when it comes to the Integrity pillar; and

QVC leads in both the Resolution and Empathy pillars.

What is not easy to do, from the report, is to see at one glance what each of the Top 10 brands does in terms of these six pillars. So I have taken some time to piece that together for you and here it is:

Coming Next

In the next and last post, I will share with you details of the “brands that have cracked the code” and are making major leaps forward – according to Nunwood. And in particular I will single out one brand that shows up for as being truly innovative in its business model, in customer engagement, in being social and making online community work, in putting its customers truly at the centre of its way of doing business. I also happen to be a customer of this brand.

Which are the UK’s Top 10 Customer Experience brands and why?

1. Amazon has dropped to fourth place. Why? The report suggests that this is due to two factors: reputation damage related to tax avoidance and performance of delivery companies.

2. QVC (TV centred shopping channel) comes in at no 2. It appears that in previous years the responses failed to meet the minimum required and so QVC was excluded.

3. The Co-operative Bank has not just fallen out of the Top 10, it has fallen out of the Top 100. Given it’s much publicised troubles centred on its finances this does not come as a surprise. Above all, it occurs to me, that a bank has to have a reputation for being financially sound.

4. M&S, one of the UK’s traditional and loved brands, has moved into the Top 10.

5. Four out of the Top 10 positions are held by two organisations – The John Lewis Partnership and M&S: organisations that have a reputation for caring about their people, caring about their customers and showing this through the quality-range- vfm of their products, and the quality of their service.

Which industries dominate the Top 100 Customer Experience brands?

Given that Nunwood has not done an analysis by industry, it occurred to me that it would be useful to do one. Here is what shows up:

The retail industry leads in the sense that 44 out of the Top 100 places are filled by retail brands. And 10 of the Top 22 customer experience brands are in retail (as classified by Nunwood). Please note I have not listed all of the retail brands in the Top 100 – too many brands.

The supermarkets take 3 out of the Top 10 places, 7 out of the Top 20 places, and 11 out of the Top 100 places. That is quite some domination given the relatively small number of players in this category. It’s interesting that all of the big names are in the Top 20 except for Tesco (47), Morrisons (29) and Lidl (53).

The food & eatery industry takes 14 out of the Top 100 places. None of the brands in this category is in the Top 50. It is interesting to note that Starbucks is missing from the Top 100. Could this be due to the brand damage that Starbucks has suffered due to the tax avoidance issue that has hit Starbucks much harder than say Amazon? Who says life is fair?

The travel & tourism industry takes 16 out of the Top 100 places. There is only one brand in the Top 10 (Virgin Atlantic) and three in the Top 20 (Virgin Atlantic, Butlins, Emirates). Looks like airline travel experience is not that hard to get right if you are committed to getting it right like Virgin Atlantic and Emirates. The surprise appearance (for me) is Butlins. It looks like Butlins have invested in their staff and their hotels and this is paying off.

The telecoms & media industry only takes 3 out of the Top 100 places. Do you notice who is missing? All the big brands like Vodafone, Sky, EE, BT, O2, TalkTalk, Virgin Media …… yet these are the very brands that do much talking about customer service, customer experience, customer-centricity. Seems to me that all this customer talk could just be ‘marketing talk’.

The financial services industry takes 12 out of the Top 100 places. And like the telecoms industry none of the big brands – Barclays, RBS, Lloyds, Santander – are present. It will be interesting to see how much headway the supermarket brands – M&S Bank (23), Sainsburys Bank (83) – can make in this industry. Given the shift to digital-mobile banking, it would be interesting to see what will happen when the likes of Amazon decide to go into that market.

The energy & utilities industry. Have you noticed that not one of the energy and utility players is in the Top 100? No British Gas, no EDF, no Npower, no E.on, no Thames Water, no Severn Trent ….. If the energy industry proves anything it proves this, you don’t need to pay attention to customers when you have structured the industry into an oligopoly and customers have to come to you to buy an essential product.

What does it take to be a Customer Experience leader?

If there is one thing I am clear on it is this, one cannot become a customer experience leader by bolting on customer experience trinkets to the existing way of being-doing. This is about as effective as taking a frigate, adding bits and piece of a fighter plane (say wings), and expecting the frigate to be a great fighter plane. That is just stupid. Most of us can see this stupidity when it comes to warships and fighter places. When it comes to organisations, it is amazing how few see the stupidity of taking this route. What does the Nunwood report say?

Culture and climate are the foundation stone of great experiences. Experiences are delivered through people, the above companies are focusing on creating a culture and climate that starts with meeting all of the customer’s needs, emotional, rational and transactional and then replicating across channels.

Customer experience has many moving parts the key is an integrated approach across a business. It demands an intense focus over the long term. It has to be kept on everyone’s daily agenda.

This requires customer experience to be woven into the fabric of the company, reward, performance management and planning.

Coming next

Enough for today. In the next post, I will take a more detailed look at some of the more interesting brands in the Top 100. Until then I wish you the very best.